In 2016, Donald Trump proved that the so-called “mainstream” media was really just a toothless giant, and outlets like CNN have been determined to never allow that to happen again.

So they began to badger social media companies about the spread of “fake” news on their platforms.

In reality, what CNN wanted was for tech companies to censor conservative media.

Reporters for CNN singled out InfoWars as their test case.

Journalists at CNN hounded Facebook and other tech companies for allowing InfoWars – which is run by the controversial pro-Trump host Alex Jones – to publish content on their sites when they knew were “conspiracy theories.”

After a weeks-long media firestorm, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and Facebook have now banned all InfoWars pages and podcasts from their platforms.

Facebook released a statement explaining the reason for their decision:

As a result of reports we received, last week, we removed four videos on four Facebook Pages for violating our hate speech and bullying policies. These pages were the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the InfoWars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page. In addition, one of the admins of these Pages – Alex Jones – was placed in a 30-day block for his role in posting violating content to these Pages.

Since then, more content from the same Pages has been reported to us — upon review, we have taken it down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies.

All four Pages have been unpublished for repeated violations of Community Standards and accumulating too many strikes. While much of the discussion around Infowars has been related to false news, which is a serious issue that we are working to address by demoting links marked wrong by fact checkers and suggesting additional content, none of the violations that spurred today’s removals were related to this.

But what struck many conservatives as frightening was the reasoning all the social media giants gave.

None of the tech companies cited the conspiracy theories, such as Jones saying the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, as their reason for banning InfoWars.

Facebook, Google, and Apple all claimed InfoWars violated community standards against hate speech.

This was music to the ears of outlets like CNN.

Liberals consider all conservative views as hate speech.

And they just succeeded in getting several social media giants to ban a Trump supporter for their political views.

CNN’s Oliver Darcy bragged on Twitter that the media had finally claimed a scalp.

Critics fear that because CNN and other left-leaning outlets have tasted blood, they will go after more conservative sites and use the same precedent they set for banning InfoWars in order to silence more conservative news sites ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

Journalists believe Trump won in 2016 because he controlled the narrative.

They are determined to never again allow dissenting voices to disrupt the monopoly they have on controlling the flow of information to Americans.

Alex Jones was low-hanging fruit.

InfoWars was an easy target because of Jones’ history of controversial statements.

But now that CNN and other media outlets have proven they can bully social media companies into being the ideological enforcers of their political agenda, you can expect more conservative sites targeted for censorship in the run-up to the 2018 midterms.